Tom Hanks Talks The Pacific Mini-Series

How much am I looking forward to Tom Hanks’ return to World War II, this time in the Pacific theater, with the epic mini-series “The Pacific”? So much that I’m even contemplating signing up for HBO just so I can see the episodes as they are rolled out on their first-runs, instead of waiting for the DVD or, ahem, using other means to see them, the way I did with “Band of Brothers”. Collider recently had a chance to talk to Hanks about “The Pacific”, and here are the highlights.

Collider: I was going to ask you specifically about “The Pacific”. How is that going?

Tom Hanks: It’s half-way done. There are going to be 10 hours in there I think we just started our 5th hour down there.

Collider: And how would you compare it to “Band of Brothers”?

Tom Hanks: It has to be different because it just can’t be the same theme. It’s not as clean as “Band of Brothers”. “Band of Brothers” came from Ambrose’s book and we bought 4 or 5 books and they were like…we just happened to be able to intersect them. And we can’t just go back and re-create World War II one more time. You have to make it a much more personal saga and also the nature of warfare in the South Pacific was so different than say liberating Holland. So it’s going to be tougher. It’s going to be a hard…I mean to watch…it’s going to be a harder series.

Wow, are you kidding me? “The Pacific” is going to be “harder” than “Band of Brothers”? That’s saying a lot, because “Band of Brothers” was pretty damn brutal at certain points.